Scuba Diving in the Maldives
I visited the Maldives in May of 2012 and was on the sane trip as reviewer cdub. I will try not to be repetitive.
The water temps are in the 79-81 range and the air temp is in the 80-85 range but there is usually a nice breeze most of the day. Currents varied from spot to spot and there was generally a medium current, with some spots with very strong currents. We had divers with a variety of experience and nobody had any issues. Our locations were mostly in the North Ari Atoll which is one of the largest areas for diving. One of my favorite spots was Hukrueli Faru which has Manta cleaning stations. The depths there varied from 25-100 feet. Kudarah Thila made me feel like I was in an aquarium. The density and variety of life was amazing. Giant schools of Oriental Sweetlips with some Groupers mixed in. The biggest highlight for me was diving with manta's and seeing a napolean wrasse the size of a volkswagon beetle. We went chasing for whale sharks which we finally did see but there was such a crowd of tourists on the surface that it became claustrophobic so beware.
Topside there was not much opportunity since the biggest island is the capital which is 3 miles square. It was interesting to see the capital and and feel like you saw almost all of it in an hour. Seeing the planes landing on runway was surreal since it looks like the plane is going to land on the water. We did spend one night on the main island as we landed late the night before we got on the liveaboard, but I would have been happy staying on the very nice resort on the airport island that I was not aware of until the end of the trip. There was the comedy factor of seeing the rather absurdities(to us westerners at least) of the hotel set up and the insane amount of scooters roaming the "streets". I did skip a night dive and visited a very tiny island with some of the crew and a couple others from our group. The island was Rashdoo and we walk the perimeter in about 25 minutes. The people were very polite and hearing the mosques call to prayers was very beautiful.
Overall the Maldives will probably the greatest tropical location I will ever go to. I saw pretty much everything I hoped to see which made it worth the almost 20 hours of flying. This is definitively one of those once in a lifetime trip that you take if the opportunity comes.
